The Friday morning after Dylan Larkin’s request for a trade was made public has yielded a significant amount of the “blame game” going around the internet and sports talk radio.
Whose fault is it that the Red Wings’ home-grown captain has chosen to leave his team? Is it Larkin’s fault for being a 29-year-old turncoat, if not someone for whom the rebuild has passed him by? Is it Steve Yzerman’s fault for not bringing the rebuild to fruition sooner? Is it the fault of Larkin’s teammates, good or bad, for not holding up their end of the performance bargain? Or could it even be the fault of the coaching staff for not getting the best out of their players for two Marches in a row?
Folks, when a player-and-team divorce of this magnitude happens (and there are few divorces that are uglier than this one in terms of professional sports), everybody has egg on their faces, and there’s more than enough blame to go around. Attempting to dump all one’s frustrations and disappointment on one party just isn’t useful.
Is Larkin at fault for losing patience with the rebuild and wanting “out” for selfish reasons? Of course.
Is Steve Yzerman’s laconically slow rebuild to blame, given that Larkin was 19 when he joined the Red Wings, and is 30 years old on a still-rebuilding roster? Of course.
Are Larkin’s teammates at fault to some extent, because they’ve never quite been able to deliver in terms of their on-ice performances or off-ice leadership (culminating with this bullshit, “It’s the outside noise that’s at fault for our performance” line at the end of this past season)? Of course.
And have the coaches failed their team and captain? Yes, they have.
I just don’t believe that the answer as to what prompted this complicated situation can be boiled down into a single, simple explanation at this point.
And it’s not productive or useful to dump blame upon one party or the other, because this is far from a no-fault divorce due to nothing more than “irreconcilable differences.” This is a messy situation, and we all know it.
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn about what factors set up this split in the future, when Larkin feels safe to share his rationale for asking “out,” and it is at least within the realm of possibility that the Red Wings’ secretive GM might share his thoughts upon the subject at some point in the future, too.
But hockey’s culture is one that preaches a stiff upper lip, and both Larkin and his soon-to-be-former management team tend not to allow in-house skirmishes or dust-ups reach the viewing or supporting public.
The one truism about the Yzerman-led Red Wings that’s held out over the decade-plus rebuild is that the team runs like a submarine–silently, without any leaks–and I don’t believe that this, “We’re just not going to tell you the how’s or why’s” philosophy is going to change any time soon.
So Dylan will likely be traded around the draft or the start of free agency, if not sometime during the summer, when we least expect it, and he’ll keep his mouth shut (mostly) about what transpired between player and team; the GM and coaching staff will keep their mouths shut (mostly) about what transpired between player, management and coaching staff; and the Red Wings’ players will definitely defer when it comes to explaining why their captain had a sudden change of heart as to serving as the beating heart of the Red Wings’ rebuild-in-progress.
We’re not likely to learn the full story as to why we Red Wings fans find our hearts broken and our feelings all of angry (if not enraged), disappointed, frustrated and sad at the same time. If somebody lets the full story slip, it’s likely to be years from now, not days or months from the present, shocking moment.
Everyone is to blame here, perhaps in equal measure, and there is no one who escapes fault for such a stark and imminent departure of a captain who told us a couple months ago that he wanted to spend forever as a Red Wing.
I know that we’re all angry today, and that we’re looking for one party upon which to assign blame, but it’s just not that simple, and it’s never going to be cut-and-dry. We all have to learn to live with that uncertainty, and slowly but surely grieve the relationship between player and team, and move on.
That’s going to take weeks and months, if not years, and, as I said yesterday, it’s never going to be easy to see Larkin’s jersey on the clearance rack, but that’s how this situation is going to end.
